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In the "The Twilight Zone" episode "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine", Ida Lupino plays Barbara Jean Trenton, a Norma Desmond-type movie star whose glory days are behind her. She spends her days wallowing in self-pity, drinking booze, and watching 16mm reels of her old performances. Her old showbiz friends are all either retired or dead, and she resents that she can't land any glamorous leading roles anymore. She is offered a role as a young ingénue's mother, but she refuses to accept how old she is. The episode ends with Barbara locking herself in her projection room, wishing deeply that life could be as marvelous as it was 30 years ago. Her wish comes true. She magically, bodily shunts herself through her movie screen into the 16mm movie where she, and all her friends, are youthful forever. 

"The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" was only the first time Ida Lupino was involved with "The Twilight Zone.

Often under the guise of procedural television that encapsulates suspense, horror, and science fiction, anthologies are a format of cinematic storytelling that often gets tossed under the rug of narrative mediums. However, whenever one does surface, it's often a great labor of love with clever stories, chilling revelations, and spicy plots.

With Prime's Secret Level animated anthology covering stories throughout the gaming universe of both the virtual and tabletop fandoms, it's a great time to revisit or discover some other great televised anthologies that scratch that same itch that present such a variety of style and narrative flare. These anthologies are placed based on their relatability to Secret Level's tone, style, and originality, and how close the listed show relates to that feeling. So what's the next short-story extravaganza to binge to get that fix?

The Outer Limits Zeroed-In On Sci-Fi's Burning Questions

Year

1963-65, 1995-2002

Where Can I Watch?...

When it comes to acting superstardom, few professional Thespians have as many "certified fresh" films in their portfolio of work as the man, the myth, the legend, John Wayne. In order to achieve such a feat, any movie an actor has appeared in must have scored at least 75% or higher, with at least five reviews from Top Critics, while boasting a minimum of 80 reviews on the aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.

To his great credit, John Wayne starred in seven films throughout his prolific career, which earned him this "certified fresh" distinction. Spanning a whole range of genres, including war films, romances, and, of course, Westerns, John Wayne continues to prove himself as one of Hollywood's most remarkable talents to this day, as many of his greatest pictures continue to be beloved by critics of all generations.

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Related 15 John Wayne Movies That Changed the Western Genre

John Wayne's prolific career...

Although only one of these 1950s B&w thrillers falls within a mile of a hard definition of film noir, all give us glamorous actresses in interesting roles. Claudette Colbert takes her turn at playing a nun, Merle Oberon tries a femme fatale role on for size and Hedy Lamarr does very well for herself as a man-hungry movie star. Kino gives all three excellent transfers, and one comes with an appropriately gossipy audio commentary.

Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema II

Thunder on the Hill, The Price of Fear, The Female Animal

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1951-58 / B&w / 1:37 Academy, 1:85 widescreen / 84,79,82 min. / Street Date May 12, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 49.95

Starring: Claudette Colbert, Ann Blyth, Robert Douglas, Anne Crawford, Connie Gilchrist, Gladys Cooper, Michael Pate, Phillip Friend; Merle Oberon, Lex Barker, Charles Drake, Gia Scala, Warren Stevens, Phillip Pine, Konstantin Shayne, Stafford Repp; Hedy Lamarr, Jane Powell,...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***"Would you recognize Milton Berle without his mother? No!" So says the man himself, Milton Berle, in Over My Dead Body (1942), a fairly shoddy reminder that Berle was, for now-inexplicable reasons, a movie star in the early forties. But while some talent from radio and vaudeville slid into cinema with the ease of the proverbial buttered eel, Berle somehow got lodged halfway down cinema's throat, for reasons which may tell us something about classical Hollywood filmmaking, and something about this particular clown.Fox tested Berle on...

This classy Fox production was considered the epitome of sick film subject matter in the pre- Psycho year of 1959, the true story of jazz-age thrill killers Leopold & Loeb. Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman are the nihilistic child murderers; Orson Welles stops the show with his portrayal of Clarence Darrow, going under a different name.

Compulsion

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1959 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date March 7, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell, Diane Varsi, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Richard Anderson, Robert F. Simon, Edward Binns, Gavid McLeod, Russ Bender, Peter Brocco.

Cinematography: William C. Mellor

Film Editor: William Reynolds

Original Music: Lionel Newman

Written by Richard Murphy from a novel by Meyer Levin

Produced by Richard D. Zanuck

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Movies about serial killers and psychos with exotic agendas were much different before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which hit America in 1960 like a thrown brick.

The restoration of a newly rediscovered director’s cut of the 1931 The Front Page prompts this two-feature comedy disc — Lewis Milestone’s early talkie plus the sublime Howard Hawks remake, which plays a major gender switch on the main characters of Hecht & MacArthur’s original play.

His Girl Friday / The Front Page

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 849

Available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 10, 2017 / 39.96

His Girl Friday:

1940 / B&W /1:37 flat Academy / 92 min.

Starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Kolb, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Regis Toomey, Abner Biberman, Frank Orth, John Qualen, Helen Mack, Alma Kruger, Billy Gilbert, Marion Martin.

Cinematography Joseph Walker

Film Editor Gene Havelick

Original Music Sidney Cutner, Felix Mills

Written by Charles Lederer from the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur

Produced and Directed by Howard Hawks

The Front Page:...

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. ca. 1935. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was never as popular as his father, silent film superstar Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in one action-adventure blockbuster after another in the 1920s (The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad) and whose stardom dates back to the mid-1910s, when Fairbanks toplined a series of light, modern-day comedies in which he was cast as the embodiment of the enterprising, 20th century “all-American.” What this particular go-getter got was screen queen Mary Pickford as his wife and United Artists as his studio, which he co-founded with Pickford, D.W. Griffith, and Charles Chaplin. Now, although Jr. never had the following of Sr., he did enjoy a solid two-decade-plus movie career. In fact, he was one of the few children of major film stars – e.g., Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Angelina Jolie, Michael Douglas, Jamie Lee Curtis – who had successful film careers of their own.

Cary Grant films on TCM: Gender-bending 'I Was a Male War Bride' (photo: Cary Grant not gay at all in 'I Was a Male War Bride') More Cary Grant films will be shown tonight, as Turner Classic Movies continues with its Star of the Month presentations. On TCM right now is the World War II action-drama Destination Tokyo (1943), in which Grant finds himself aboard a U.S. submarine, alongside John Garfield, Dane Clark, Robert Hutton, and Tom Tully, among others. The directorial debut of screenwriter Delmer Daves (The Petrified Forest, Love Affair) -- who, in the following decade, would direct a series of classy Westerns, e.g., 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree -- Destination Tokyo is pure flag-waving propaganda, plodding its way through the dangerous waters of Hollywood war-movie stereotypes and speechifying banalities. The film's key point of interest, in fact, is Grant himself -- not because he's any good,...

Joan Fontaine movies: ‘This Above All,’ ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ (photo: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine in ‘Suspicion’ publicity image) (See previous post: “Joan Fontaine Today.”) Also tonight on Turner Classic Movies, Joan Fontaine can be seen in today’s lone TCM premiere, the flag-waving 20th Century Fox release The Above All (1942), with Fontaine as an aristocratic (but socially conscious) English Rose named Prudence Cathaway (Fontaine was born to British parents in Japan) and Fox’s top male star, Tyrone Power, as her Awol romantic interest. This Above All was directed by Anatole Litvak, who would guide Olivia de Havilland in the major box-office hit The Snake Pit (1948), which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nod. In Max Ophüls’ darkly romantic Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Fontaine delivers not only what is probably the greatest performance of her career, but also one of the greatest movie performances ever. Letter from an Unknown Woman...